Couple, by Hans Christoph, one of some 1,400 works confiscated from Cornelius Gurlitt, whose father worked for the Nazis. Photograph: Lost Art Koordinierungsstelle

The art is innocent. It deserves to be seen. Whatever the tangle of crime and cruelty that lay behind Cornelius Gurlitt’s strange inheritance of a secret art collection from his father, who had worked for the Nazis as an art dealer, he finally did the right thing in leaving it to the Kunstmuseum Bern, and this excellent museum, which already has important works by artists such as Picasso and Paul Klee, is totally correct in accepting his bequest.

The more than 1,200 paintings and watercolours for which it will take responsibility are neither poisoned gifts nor macabre spoils, but important works of art that need to be taken out of their disreputable context and seen again simply as paintings. Some of the artists represented in this extraordinary collection lived before the Nazi era with which their works were to become entangled. Courbet, Monet and Manet had no conception of Europe’s 20th-century future. Why should there be some imaginary stain on Monet’s Waterloo Bridge?

The true story of the Gurlitt collection is as yet barely known. Only a handful of works have so far been claimed by the heirs of Jewish owners from whom they were stolen by the Nazis. They are clearly not the only looted paintings in the collection. Some stolen works will never be claimed. The potential heirs have no record or all close family members were murdered in the Holocaust.

Child at a Table, by Otto Griebel, one of some 1,400 works in the Gurlitt hoard. Photograph: Lost Art Koordinierungsstelle

The burden of owning such haunted works will be shared by Bern’s gallery with museums around the world, for there is today a new honesty about the fate of art during the Nazi era. Provenances are no longer concealed. This makes a responsible museum the right place for these works of art. There they can be scrutinised, cleaned and catalogued and are much more likely to be recognised by researchers and claimants than if they were kept hidden in a bank vault.

Not only is this art innocent of any crime. Some of it was hated by the Nazis for its freedom, humanity, and courage. The paintings of Otto Dix, Franz Marc and other modernists in the Gurlitt hoard were reviled by Hitler as “degenerate”. German public galleries were forced to take down “degenerate” art in the 1930s. Hildebrand Gurlitt was commissioned to sell such works on behalf of the state.

That makes the collection he left to his son a testament to defiance and subversion. What was so dangerous about Dix that he had to be banned? More people will now be able to see these outrageous works for themselves. A shame, perhaps, that it has to be outside Germany. Whatever Gurlitt’s reasons for leaving his art to a Swiss museum, the effect is to strip Germany of the German art Hitler loathed.

Yet the miracle is that it survived at all. Many masterpieces were destroyed in the 1940s. Crucial works by Caravaggio, Courbet, Van Gogh and Klimt are gone for ever, lost in the Nazi inferno. It is wonderful that at least this cache of lost works has resurfaced.

It is time to celebrate the Gurlitt collection. However haunted, it is a treasure trove of the modern age that needs to be seen. Bern has bravely taken on the challenge of doing justice to the art and its rightful owners.

Nigel Warburton: The moral philosopher: The paintings left to Bern Museum by Cornelius Gurlitt, son of a Nazi-era collector, may have strictly speaking been legally acquired but many were seized from Jewish owners